Carol Thomas

• Advanced Paediatric Nurse Practitioner at Royal Glamorgan Hospital, Llantrisant

Background Internationally, evidence on the support needs of family carers who look after a terminally ill adult in home settings is incomplete. Aim To illustrate the relevance of ‘relevant background worries’ in family carers’ accounts of caring at home for a dying adult. Design A qualitative cross-sectional observational study was conducted in...

This article considers the recent history and consequences of positioning people living with dementia in the realms of disability, disablism and disability rights. The geo-political focus is the United Kingdom and neighbouring resource-rich nations in the Global North. The first section examines the growing trend of identifying ‘dementia’ with ‘dis...

Background: older people aged 80 and over are increasingly providing end-of-life care to spouses at home and often do so for long periods of time, while also trying to manage their own illnesses and disabilities. Little of the research on older spousal carers has focussed on the oldest carers; hence, the needs of this particular population are not...

Dying at home is the preference of many patients with life-limiting illness. This is often not achieved and a key factor is the availability of willing and able family carers. To elicit family carers' views about the community support that made death at home possible. Qualitative study in East Devon, North Lancashire, and Cumbria. Participants were...

Objective To explore how bereaved family members recall managing end of life medications when delivering care to a patient dying at home in England. Design Qualitative study. Setting Domestic homes in two contrasting areas in England. Participants 59 bereaved family carers who have delivered care to a patient who spent a minimum of 2 weeks at home...

Aims: This research considered the clinical and organisational issues for integrative medicine from the multiple viewpoints of its primary stakeholders: GPs, Clinics, Patients and the CAM therapist, studying the interface between complementary and orthodox practitioners working together. Methodology: Two National Health Service (NHS) primary care c...

Background Recent end of life care policy prioritises patient choice over place of care and in particular promotes dying at home. This policy is predicated on the assumption that there are family carers able and willing to provide care for the dying person. Through the accounts of bereaved family members, the ‘Unpacking the home’ study aims to gain...

This paper offers an interpretive account of an ongoing transatlantic debate about illness narratives instigated by the publication in 1997 of Paul Atkinson's paper Narrative Turn Or Blind Alley? The claims and counter-claims to be found in this debate about narrative data and narrative analysis are set out sequentially, in an attempt to grasp the...

Narrative methods have played a minor role in research with dying patients to date, and deserve to be more widely understood. This article illustrates the utility and value of these methods through the narrative analysis of semi-structured interview data gathered in a series of interviews with two terminally ill cancer patients and their spouses. T...

This article considers the methodological uncertainties arising in the early months of a research project that involves the secondary data analysis, using narrative analysis methods, of lengthy interview transcripts with cancer patients and their main informal carers. It revisits the particular social contexts, purposes and intentions involved in t...

This paper contributes to the development of theory and research on inequalities in health. Our central premise is that these are currently limited because they fail adequately to address the relationship between agency and structure, and that lay knowledge in the form of narrative has a significant contribution to make to this endeavour. The paper...

This paper reviews theory and research on disability and gender from a UK perspective. It reflects upon the theoretical perspectives and debates that are to be found in UK disability studies today, and considers their relevance for research on the gendered nature of disability. Themes in empirical research are noted, as is the representation and tr...

Research on the distribution of cancer deaths by setting-hospital, hospice, home, other--is longstanding, but has been given fresh impetus in the UK by policy commitments to increase the proportion of deaths occurring in patients' homes. Studies of factors associated with the location of cancer deaths fall into two main categories: geo-epidemiologi...

This article describes a study in which a systematic classification of cancer patients was produced on the basis of their needs. A series of 380 cancer patients from four hospitals in the North West of England responded to a self-completion questionnaire that included a 48-item inventory of psychosocial needs covering seven needs domains (informati...

This paper considers sociological understandings of what constitutes disability. Current meanings of disability in both disability studies and medical sociology are examined and compared, using selected articles from leading authors in each discipline as case studies. These disciplines are often represented as offering starkly contrasting approache...

Considerable research effort has been devoted to describing and explaining, at a variety of spatial scales, geographical inequalities in health outcomes within the developed world. Following Bourdieu, we argue that structures of the social world may be revealed in different kinds of 'social' space. We outline the relational thinking that underlies...

The place of death of cancer patients has become an important theme in UK cancer and palliative care policy. This paper examines the place of death preferences of 41 terminally ill cancer patients and 18 of their informal carers, living in the Morecambe Bay area of north-west England. We interviewed cancer patients referred to the research team by...

This paper considers some of the themes to be found in current UK debates about the social model of disability. It commences with a review of the origins and key features of the social model, then moves on to an examination of current critiques of its efficacy. The argument advanced is that the radical ideas that laid the foundation for the social...

In 1999–2000, a pilot study was conducted to assess the feasibility of using local historical archives and oral histories to map historical factors that may be important in understanding contemporary variations in health. Focusing on housing clearances in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, the pilot study drew on a wide range of materials (documentary and...

This paper explores the links between lay knowledge, place and health related social action (or agency) at the individual and collective level. It is based on an analysis of in-depth interviews and neighbourhood survey data across four localities in two cities in the North West of England.The qualitative analysis has identified 'guidelines' that we...

This paper seeks to contribute to the limited body of work that has directly explored lay understandings of the causes of health inequalities. Using both quantitative and qualitative methodology, the views of people living in contrasting socio-economic neighbourhoods are compared. The findings support previous research in suggesting that lay theori...

This paper considers some of the challenges involved in studying informal carers in cancer contexts. It reviews current knowledge by examining, first, the dominant psycho-oncological research tradition that focuses on psychological distress among carers and, second, the more recent sociologically informed body of work examining what carers actually...

This research considers the impact of having a religious faith on the cancer experience of patients and informal carers, focusing primarily on the association between faith and psychosocial needs. A questionnaire survey of 1000 patients in the north-west of England returned 402 completed questionnaires; around two-thirds of patients indicated they...

This paper explores the care-giving experiences of informal carers in cancer contexts, drawing on both quantitative and qualitative data generated in a 3 year study in the UK on the psychosocial needs of cancer patients and their main carers. The study adopted a sociological approach to psychosocial needs, in contrast to dominant psychological and...

This paper explores the care-giving experiences of informal carers in cancer contexts, drawing on both quantitative and qualitative data generated in a 3 year study in the UK on the psychosocial needs of cancer patients and their main carers. The study adopted a sociological approach to psychosocial needs, in contrast to dominant psychological and...

In this article I examine the intersection of gender and disability in the medical arena by considering disabled women's experiences of receiving health care in the United Kingdom. Drawing on the "social model of disability," I focus on the attitudes and practices of doctors. I use two sources of qualitative data: (i) 68 disabled women's narratives...

Significant unmet needs' are those needs that patients identify as both important and unsatisfied. In this article we ask whether the overall needs of cancer patients are actually being met. We believe that the range of unmet need, and the kinds of patients who are more likely to claim unmet need, should be carefully identified. The needs responses...

To explore some of the social barriers disabled women face when they think about having a child, become pregnant, come into contact with the maternity and related services, and become mothers. A qualitative study involving in-depth semi-structured interviews with 17 disabled women. This was a follow-up study associated with a large health authority...

The aim of this paper is to explore key dimensions of the reproductive experiences of disabled women who are, or who are thinking about becoming, mothers. The paper reports a qualitative study which involved semi-structured interviews with 17 disabled women who were contemplating childbearing, or were pregnant, and/or had young children. The interp...

What people do when they have symptoms or suspicion of a sexually transmitted disease (STD) has major implications for transmission and, consequently, for disease control. Delays in seeking and obtaining diagnosis and treatment can allow for continued transmission and the greater probability of adverse sequelae. An understanding of health seeking b...